The Bobbies know best

While I do not intend this blog to be some kind of running commentary on current events, the goings-on in Baltimore, NYC and elsewhere (and yes, including the effort here in Rockford to unseat the police chief) leave me no choice.


Nearly 38 years ago, after deciding I wanted to do more than jockey a squad car around, I entered grad school in Administration of Justice at SIU-Carbondale.  As a grad assistant to Dr. Fred Klyman, one of my first assignments was being handed the textbook for a course in Police Community Relations and being told to basically run the class.  Actually, I had fun with this class, which starts out in Chapter 1 talking about Peel's Principles of Law Enforcement--sort of one of the underpinnings of modern law enforcement.  [remind me later to tell you about meeting Sir Geoffrey Dear of the LMP].


Principle 6 of Sir Robert Peel reads, in relevant part, as follows:  "The police should use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient to achieve police objectives". Peel asserted that "the police are the public and the public are the police". 


A little short of 200 years later, and following countless wars, conflicts (large and small), battles, skirmishes, conflagrations, and mild pissing contests, we still seem to be plagued with a fundamental need to cast the world in "us vs. them" rather than acknowledging that it is and always will be JUST US!


I'm as guilty as the next of this human frailty, but I'm learning every day how to correct that.  In the final analysis, folks, policing is a mano-a-mano kind of deal.  Decisions and the exercise of discretion by our men and women in blue boil down to zillions of individual human interactions each and every day.  This is where we need to focus our attention. Sorry, but not sure that body cams will cure this one.  Remind me also to tell you one of my personal stories of persuasion that worked and violence avoided.  Thanks, Sir Robert.